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AIX Down Under

About this blog

Anthony English is an independent contractor who solves expensive problems for businesses running IBM Power Systems.
He has written extensively about AIX and has been recognised for his contributions and thought leadership by being named an IBM Champion for Power Systems.

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On 11 April, 2012 IBM is launching Expert Integrated Systems . If you can trust the announcements, these will be "a new breed of systems with integrated expertise." Well, I don't have any inside knowledge on the announcement, but I have to say I'm pretty curious and more than just a bit excited. The new systems promise: built-in expertise integration by design; and a simplified overall experience to change the economics of IT The Expert Integrated Systems are "optimized for immediate deployment." Now, however much... [More]

If you've been unconscious or absent from the planet the last few days, you won't have heard of IBM PureSystems . Jason McGee, Chief Architect for PureApplication system, showcased the easy installation and configuration of these new, factory-tuned, expert integrated systems. You can watch Jason's 6-minute demo and then sit in the crowded waiting room of Dr. AIX Down Under (that's me on the left). Every patient has the same condition. They're all highly motivated, and generally highly skilled AIX engineers. They're all asking the same... [More]

Just a reminder that AIX 5.3 goes out of support on 30 April 2012. That means the end of standard support. If you must keep your AIX 5.3 systems and can't upgrade it (you probably can, more easily than you realise), you could create a versioned WPAR running AIX 5.3 on an Power7 system within and AIX 7.1 logical partition. You can build it all with a mksysb restore. For more details, see this document .

The team from IBM's Advanced Technology Support, Europe have done it again! Their free Webinar Series on Power Systems Virtualisation from IBM has another contribution from Nigel Griffiths, (a.k.a. Mr NMon). This presentation is on Shared Storage Pools from Experience - a kind of walk through of where the rubber hits the road. On the PowerVM Virtualisation Webinar Series Wiki , scroll down to Session 13: Shared Storage Pools ... from Experience. As you probably know, Shared Storage Pools allow you to have a large single chunk of storage... [More]

This is the epic of the upgrade for the Virtual I/O server (VIOS) from version 1.4 to version 2.2. It's not a pleasant read, so if you're of a weak stomach, just skip the whole blog post, but note two things when it comes to VIOS and firmware upgrades: Always read the README Consider a fresh install of the VIOS The Epic Begins Much as we'd like all our systems to be running
the newest and latest of everything, most of us are not so lucky.
There are still some very old environments out there, running on old
hardware. I suppose it's a... [More]

The find command can break the spirit of even the most hardened Unix zealot. Imagine what it must be like for a newcomer to ask (innocently enough): "how can I remove log files in /apps directory that haven't been changed in the last two months?" zealotsweep.sh You (the zealot) knock out a command like this: find /apps -xdev -name "*.log" -type f -mtime +60 -exec rm -f {} \; > /tmp/clean_appslogs.out 2>&1 ... and your apprentice (who uses voice search on a SmartPhone and doesn't know how to type or what... [More]

If you are using virtual SCSI (VSCSI) disks, you may occasionally find you need to reclaim them. (Shocking as it may seem, sometimes people actually do give back disk they have requested for some temporary project). Here's how to reclaim a VSCSI disk and its associated SAN LUN. Ordinarily, there should be no need for a reboot, either of the AIX logical partition or the Virtual I/O Server. I'm giving a sort-of high level view, skipping the SAN allocation details. Switching into reverse Removing a VSCSI disk (and its LUN) is just the... [More]

I wonder how many businesses have a serious Disaster Recovery plan. I have been thinking about this as I have recently been invited to do a test Disaster Recovery run using Vision Solutions' software, DoubleTake RecoverNow for AIX . I'll post some blogs about how it looks. I'm keen to find DR solutions that are simple and comprehensive. Sadly, many existing plans are neither. For plenty of companies, the DR plan consists of little more than a blind hope that nothing's gonna go wrong. What does your DR plan look like? How many DR plans have... [More]

There are a lot of organisations out there that are still running AIX 5.3. As you must know, AIX 5.3 is out of support. That doesn't stop you updating to the latest Technology Level (TL 12). But you may not be entitled to the latest Service Pack (SP 6). If you're staying with AIX 5.3, then you have a choice of being supported; unsupported (but legal), or unsupported and illegal! Before looking at your Service Pack options for AIX 5.3, let's unravel what an AIX level really means. AIX Levels Terminology First, some bassic terminology: ... [More]

A customer did a migration from AIX 5.3 to 6.1 and then called me to report a strange set of symptoms. Some file systems didn't mount following a reboot. When the file systems in the volume group (let's call it datavg) went to mount, they returned the error that there was no such device. If the customer ran an exportvg and an importvg, all the datavg file systems became available. But then another reboot was done and the datavg file systems didn't mount. Update: I have an idea of what might have happened. The customer (as I should have... [More]